5G: Rete della società cibernetica by Silvia Guerini and Costantino Ragusa, Asterios Editore, a series of militant leaflets, no. 56, 4.90 euros, 48 pages, July 2021
This short essay seeks to highlight the deep social, ontological and anthropological transformations which will derive from the G5 network and from the society that is structuring itself thanks to it. The 5G network is not the simple development of the previous 2G, 3G, 4G and is something more than greater speed in transmission of data: besides being faster, it will allow more connections at the same time and the simultaneous passage of data with practically zero delay. These are essential characteristics for the development and voracity of artificial intelligence, which will progress thanks to data extrapolated from the digital world. Data which, before being grabbed and captured by algorithms, were our lives, our feelings, our body in the flesh, now product and producer of its own surveillance on a large scale.
The Big data companies will run all data and thanks to the G5 network they will push us all towards the definitive explosion of the internet of things, the so-called “intelligent planet” of IBM: a huge IT network in which everything – humans, other animals, natural environments, urban furnishings, objects, infrastructures, services – will be interconnected and will communicate in an integrated system. In this way a cybernetic and transhumanist vision will realize itself in its totality. All the fields of existence are being digitalized for an automated organization of the whole of society and the whole of life. From birth to death, existence is being subjected to elaboration, control and algorithmic management, constant monitoring which will extend to single gestures up to the remotest emotions. Devices will accompany people in daily life more and more with a whispered proximity where machines take care of them. Thus a new soft power is taking shape, which doesn’t have a face of coercion or imposition but one of free choice. Imbued with transhumanist principles of the inadequacy, imprecision, fallibility of the human being. The unforeseen, chance, limits won’t be tolerated and the human will be conceived as inadequate and error, for a constant adapting to a machine world, for a continual overcoming of limits, where it is precisely the body that is considered a limit to be overcome, becoming an object of constant performance and self-optimization. Before the yearned-for technological “singularity” what is happening is an ontological “singularity”: the very nature of the human, its biological existence, its finiteness is being transformed, for a constant implementation and genetic modification of bodies. An ontological transformation of the human to arrive at its complete dehumanization.
A bio-medicalized human being in a society where everything must be made to fit the criteria of continuous perfectibility is more and more eroded and sterilized, also in its capacity for awareness and resistance. We are getting used to considering the reality that surrounds us through the warning “nothing will ever be as before”; certainly with the convergence of techno-sciences accelerated by the health emergency it will be precisely the human being that will be transformed, emptied and filled up with, besides fear, trust in the new techno bio-medical society which we see advancing. This mad race is going at the speed of 5G, but before it reaches any goal, our dehumanization and relational lobotomy will have taken over. Incapable of perceiving the abyss precisely because they have assured us of its power to save us.
The time to understand the sense and what is at stake in these processes and in this epochal passage is now, what is going to change in the coming months and years will be forever and there will be no going back.
For another vision of the world. To remain human means to resist.
3G, 4G and is something more than greater speed in transmission of data: besides being faster, it will allow more connections at the same time and the simultaneous passage of data with practically zero delay. These are essential characteristics for the development and voracity of artificial intelligence, which will progress thanks to data extrapolated from the digital world. Data which, before being grabbed and captured by algorithms, were our lives, our feelings, our body in the flesh, now product and producer of its own surveillance on a large scale.